Looking and seeing

So I'm back in essay mode and this time the topic is Jacques Ranciere's essay 'The Intolerable Image'. Ranciere asks what makes an image intolerable? Is it the content? Or the conclusions drawn from that content by an implictaed viewer? His essay concentrates on war photography and mainly examples of the representation of war in art work. From Martha Rosler's violent juxtaposition of Vietnamese victims in pristine American homes to Alfredo Jaar's object approach to showing and concealing. His essay deals with the problem of representing through the medium of photography. Rolling out the old dialogue, on the one hand the photograph is a direct imprint of reality on the other an always-composed snippet of one distinct viewpoint removed from any kind of reality. My summing up will be left there (the essay isn't written yet!)

My tutor suggested I look to the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial which was entitled Memory of Fire; War Images and Images of War in which (another tutor) Julian Stallabrass curated 8 sites on the South coast along the theme of war images. The exhibitions were diverse and multiplicitous, a gesture which Stallabrass hoped would lead to more clarity, no doubt through questions proposed rather than answers given. Reviews describe the breadth of exhibition; the positivity of showing images from sides, the inclusion of media from photojournalism, amateur and anonymous photography and art works, the time-span from World War 2, to Vietnam and Iraq. Yet they also tiptoe around the precarious subject of content. Should images of war be put on display in an exhibition?

Ok so back to Ranciere to answer that question? I'll argue that in my essay. Right now it has made me question exhibtions in general. How do we look, when we visit exhibitions. What are we looking for? Do we go with open eyes? Or those loaded with expectation? Unanswerable questions. But it begs the question, especially with the rise of the big institutions such as Tate, should art exhibitions be relegated to realm of leisure activity? Should we go looking at war photography on a Sunday afternoon for pleasure? No and this is not imply that art can or should not be enjoyed or that it requires immense thought and critical analysis but when faced with the photograph of a face blown apart on the fields of Somme, the question becomes pertinent.

In this year (or three) or government cuts to the arts we must rescue our instutions and museums from being solely leisure facilities dependent on visitor numbers into interrogative and challenging, educational and economical places. These images must have space to be shown outside the context of the media circus in order for questions of viewing and representation to be asked. We have to be brave enough to face upto these images yet also to realise when an image is one too far (as Stallabrass and photographer Simon Norfolk did in one of the Biennials exhibitions), a good exhibition, like that in 2008, should allow us to do so.

Link to 2008 biennial website:
http://2008.bpb.org.uk/2008/

Image: Simon Norfolk

Photographic triangualtions: need help in understanding

The photograph and reproducibility is perhaps the medium of the postmodernism. To take a photograph is to freeze reality in an image, cut it out and seal it off.

postmodern because it is a work which can never be fully autonomous. It breaks down the possibility of the original. Douglas Crimp comments on this as plurality. Not a 'pluralism of originals' but plurality. As such no concrete origin can ever be located, no single moment, even though the photograph is supposed to capture a single moment for duration.

What about when a photograph lies, when it is doctored, when it is altered in post-production. Then is it art?

What about typological photography? Reducing taking pictures to a constant process which reveals difference or sameness, presence or absence, the extraordinary or the banal? Then is it art?

What about the photographic object? Then is it art?

Photographic presence, is a ghostly absence- is that the postmodern art experience- the emptying out of the image and filling up of potentiality without didacticism but subjective possibility.

These are questions... please help me answer them....

They are triangualting in my mind

Future?

I've been thinking alot about the future. Firstly through my writing; currently an essay on Turner Prize nominees The Otolith Group. The future in this essay is a hypothetical one, one that is always in the future, always just beyond our reach. Yet in a complicated turn this is a hypothetical future brought to bear on the present. Cool. Secondly a future, less hypothetical, my own. Less cool.

The Otolith trilogy is really quite inspirational, quoting, appropriating, mixing a culture which doesn't fit or doesn't quite work into one that does. A future in which images are not consumed dumb but thought about, chewed over and spat out.

The future, my future, could follow in these positive footsteps. Yet the work of the Otolith Group is in response to their unhappiness in the present moment of each film's production. Kodwo Eshun talks about the difficulty of bringing an image into a world already over-saturated; it seems that his reasoning for creation is only within a climate of need, of want, of desperation. Creation is positive in response to a dirth.

(Creation or production? A question for another time.)

So in these times of economic strife, where it seems unlikely that my future will be anything but plain sailing I feel a little bit excited. Opportunities for creation and individuality spring up when the big institutions come under pressure. People have to go elsewhere, either they create in new and exciting ways propelling the bounds and casting them aside in order to exist or they drift into another place and forget. I see neither as a negative option.

Lets hope for creativity, more ambitious writing, more interesting exhibitions which occupy the empty space created by this cultural, social and economic dirth.

See 'hither and thither' on tether television for curator's testimonies from artist-led spaces across the country.

So what happens when you have your first 4,000 word essay due for your v. expensive and renowned MA course?

Obviously, you think of a topic, plan it, write it. Hopefully (and especially if you get non-work guilt like 24/7 heartattacks) with plenty of time to spare.

Forget it, if you are writing on contemporary art.

Is it on show in London? No. Can you see it elsewhere? No. Can you write about it? No. Damn.

Annoying as this is, it also leads to some prominent questions; How do we write about a discourse which is very much still in full swing? How does chance form what we write about? How, in an environment of art over-stimulation does something stick in your mind? What if I don't want to write about something with no images? (-2 marks for bad presentation I'm afraid).

What if we do not want to write about work in institutions (ie work's already chosen to be enveloped into the canon or put up for sale), does that mean writing outside the institution cannot be done- but then are we writing an art history or an institution history?

This can surely only get worse with cuts to the arts which will reduce exhibition budgets and money for the proper archiving and making available of mixed-media and performance based artworks. These are sad times.

Wish me luck for the essay...

Marina Abramovic at the Lisson Gallery

Abramovic is one of the most famous female artists of the 21st century. Her performances from the 1970s and 80s are famous for their extremity. In 'Art must be beautiful, Artist must be beautiful' a work foundational to the women's activist art of the 1970s, Abramovic brushes and combs her own hair with varying degrees of violence whilst chanting the title of the piece. At one point she pulls in different directions quickly, catching and knotting her hair, her declarations quickening in pace and anger. This work, which connotes on a number of levels, questions the nature of beauty in art, the woman in art and the woman artist. Making herself the subject she interrogates the position of the woman's body to be perfected, what happens when it is not the man performing this action but the woman herself, when she takes the role of artist. As such does the woman artist have to violate herself to place the woman as the centre of the artwork?

This work features in the Lisson Gallery's exhibition of Abramovic's work. Split across two sites the exhibition includes the complete collection of Rhythm works (10, 5, 2, 0, 4) along with works with Ulay in the main gallery and the more recent 'Back to Simplicity' series in the second space.

This splitting was interesting; from the angry, emotive and disturbing work in the first space to the large scale photographs, films with similar photographic stillness and marble pillows for visitors to line-up their 'sex, heart and head', there was a definite shift. A case of maturity and maturing work perhaps? The press release would agree suggesting the work illustrates Abramovic's desire for a simpler life. However it is not the specific meaning of the piece that really struck me, but the difference, the shift from historicised feminist-activist work to those high resolution images of Abramovic holding a lamb as if it were a baby or lying still, dressed in white underneath an incredibly mythic looking tree. Shocking maybe not, but definitely bambooziling. No bodies on the verge of mutilation, no pushing the limits of the artist making artwork beyond consciousness just concentration, animals and lush natural settings.

There could be suggestion of the woman and nature, a redefinition of what it means to reengage with the living planet after one has tested the body and the definitions placed upon (gender, profession, etc). This seems to be a conclusion too easy to draw and it is the uncomfortability of making this or any certain definition which is provocative. The difference between the works resonates between the two settings as if splitting work that is labelled contemporary into two; the near-past and the too-near-present/future. Seeing either space alone would not be as affective as seeing the two combined-at distance, the works play off each other, jarring temporalities and contexts, juxtaposing the smooth, youthful face of anger and activity with the older face of passive wisdom. This interplay between sites and works marks the strength of the exhibition, no matter what other conclusions maybe drawn.

Frieze Art Fair, Regents Park

So, my first post from London and what more appropriate than Frieze Art Fair?

Today, as part of my course I went to Frieze Art Fair. Entering the fair my tutor's question 'What is the contemporary' rang loud, mainly because we had one hour to find a work that could in some way answer such a question.

Not so hard? Maybe not, after all anything considered with contemporary eyes could be seen as such. Is contemporary all about interpretation then? Well thats another question, one at a time.

No the question rang with resonances of time, distance, difference, light/ darkness, hierarchy and generation. There was certainly alot of that yet the hour of searching gave nothing to me but endless references to mass culture, pastel colours and art world glitz. Intimidating certainly.

Last minute I selected a work, with a rather obvious title for our Agamben-related seminar, 'The Future Chasing Past the Present' by Gabriel Lester. The work consisted of a production line belt onto which minitaure clusters of trees, people and trees had been stuck. As the production line rotated lights shone onto three of it's sides. In a darkenned side room the light cast shadows of the rotating mini-verse. Presenting ages systematically it was abeautiful piece full of delicate intricacies and literal meaning to Giorgio Agaemben's 'What is Contemporary?' essay.

Yet it was only later in my confused meanderings around stalls that I noticed another work by Neil Beloufa. Entitled "Documents are flat" the work is composed of a video framed by an installation. The installation includes a wooden structure with built-in seat and viewing space. But this is no minimalist framing it is adorned with corners of frames and images, its structures are decorated with scraps of building fabric, previously functional, here they are reduced to decoration. Beloufa's piece is focused around found materials and documents, re-using and re-applying them in this new contingent, broken-up context. The film, which forms the centre to the viewing structure is made of accounts of house lived in by terrorists that was paradoxically made of glass. As neighbour's accounts try to reason out the paradox the film traces figures, bodies to the narrative voices, walking through a paper reconstruction of house. The document which is flat, made of paper is made visual, the voices held in its words are reanimated by appropriated voices, the previously-recounted and imaginary perceived space is occupied by strange bodies.

The information offered comments; 'This improbable and irresolvable anecdote encourages the characters to invent images of an event given by media coverage, without actual images or facts, and thus missing the main issue.'

Thus this remembered-document house is made tangible, not through reconstruction but through video which cuts between images of it.

We can't fully conceive of the document-house in the same way that the space of the installation is unfathomable, it does not make sense, it hangs in the air picking up the excerpts of narrative truncated by the film. joints are overdetermined by excess of support, whereas as others are left empty, some pieces are painted vibrant colours while others are left as chipboard. The corrugated plastic roof is doubled on one half and not on the other.

So why is this contemporary? Its playfulness, its use of document, of truth of narrative of inclusion and exclusion. Breaching the topic of terrorism. Its wit, its beauty and ugliness. Its craftmanship and lack of it. But mainly because of the many questions it asks and leaves unanswered.

Exhibition = open

My body feels like ti has run 5 maratons, shoulders refuse to raise my arms above two metres, legs inscribed with splinters- installations take their toll but the exhibition I have been working on this summer at the Grundy Art Gallery is open.

Opposite is one of the images from 'Fanclub'. Don't be fooled by its vintage appearance this is no dose of nostalgia. See works by Jeremy Deller, Susanne Burner, Jessica Voorsanger and my particular favourite Graham Dolphin explore the intricacies and eccentricities of fandom. Give it time; watch, listen and look as contemporary art and contemporary culture merge....

eerie....

Ttttransition

Crikey, so many weeks I have passed without a drop. Although time has been consumed, on walks and buses, at work and at the gallery, it has not been well spent. Filled up with things to be done rather than time to do things I have read little and thought less. Yes that sentence does sound a little poncy, but facing a year of hard academic graft after a summer of relatively little serious research or thought I am scared!

Its not that I'm not interested anymore its just I feel caught up in something real rather than a complex entanglement of thoughts which will not work themselves out in my head for at least another 4 years.

Its worrying me because I have always been preoccupied with working things out. When my French teacher said write a story en francais in year 8 I muddled by narrative with complex past participles and infinitives- there was a sentence I needed to write. Well similarly my attempts to grapple with 20th century philosophy and psychology during my undergrad were often bolstered by my tutor's 'You're only an undergrad, this is difficult stuff'. I am NO LONGER an undergraduate. I am surely in a little trouble mais non?

So from learning to live with the reality of everyday in Blackpool and rediscovering the magic of its heritage to returning to that nook in my head. That web of questions, thoughts, images and sentences. This is not a sad farewell, this Summer has given me time-out, time to grow-up. (What you don't learn at uni you learn in the months directly after.) In fact it is not a farewell at all, leaving Blackpool this time does not feel like an escape. Just another chapter will begin.

(I don't think I'll see anyone else smiling in the Courtauld Institute Library either!)

Nostalgia

Things half-knitted (with the needles sticking out), jam, hot water bottles, blown out umberellas, September-October traffic jams, tram tracks, videos, Rock Lobster.

All these things inspire snapshots of memory, nothing longer. Those memories are like a place left behind or something seen long ago from far away. They are dulled by vivid.

That was the week that was...

Well it has been a fair while between posts and worryingly this is because I have been busy. Doing things. I've been meaning to write but every time I sit down in front of my keyboard I don't. Worrying to me, because I want to write about the great time I had last week, the exhibitions I saw and the simple pleasure of being elsewhere, walking around and even being on a train. Now I start to write it flows out, I just listed why I had a great time, I could go on discussing the wonderful feeling of seeing someone again after a long while or the excitement of my up and coming move to London. However it did not dawn on me to do that because we don't analyse why we are happy we just enjoy it.

We find lots to write about in our misery and our boredom. We notice details and take the time to take them in. Our starved eyes and minds look for something else in our lacking lives. When we are happy we enjoy those things. Jean Rhys commented that she only wrote in periods of unhappiness. Wide Sargasso Sea was published after a thirty year stop-gap. Many thought she was dead, she was just happy.

The title of my blog itself speaks of this culture of misery, or less harsh, irony. But too often are these blogs used as a place to vent our woes and boredom. Honestly this blog was set up in the same vane, yet over these two months although I haven't travelled the world, worked for a big corporation or interned at a magazine (all things I desired) I have been happy. I hope this blog shows that in some way. Hopefully its title will evoke its provenance; Jarvis and his Grecian sculpture-student running through the supermarket. This is not to say I'm a misfit in an unknown 'common' world but look past the ordinary and appreciate the everyday... just a little.

Ok so this will do nothing for my disillusioned-young-adult persona, my usual irony and sarcasm have been dropped by the wayside for a little cheesey, optimism. Its hard to write about happiness but easier to write about, writing about it.